Page 34 of The Pumpkin Spice Romance
“His name is Felix Faraday, and he said he’d look over my plans for a second location, and he wasn’t mad about the coffee, and he stood up for me to this other complete jerk, and he walked me out to my car.”
“Oh, cool. So, he’s the Quiet Gentleman, not the Grumpy Jerk model of the man brand.”
“Yes! Although I almost ruined it when I had one of my moments.”
“Yeah, you dumped the latte on him?”
I gave a heavy sigh as I flopped down on the couch.
“No. When he was walking me to the car. There was a homeless guy who needed some money. It was important. Kind of life or death. I know that sounds silly, but sometimes, ten bucks can go a long way. Anyway, I tried to just keep rolling, but I know he thought I was weird.”
Shayla chuckled. “I don’t know why you spend so much time trying to pretend you’re normal. You have a gift. You should embrace it.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Your family are all Shifters, and they’re used to magic. In mine, I’m the only one with any sort of psychic powers. Basically, it’s just me with my five-minute viewing window into the future, which doesn’t tell me everything and leaves me looking like a complete weirdo to anyone normal. I wish I could get all my visions at the start of the day, and then I could plan ahead, but nope. I don’t mind having a gift, but I wish it wouldn’t make me look like a spazz.”
Shayla took a breath as if she were going to say something, but shut her mouth.
“What? Whatever it is, just say it, or I’ll wait until the next time we get drunk and ask you then.”
Shayla groaned. “You’re never going to let me live that down.”
“It works every time,” I said unrepentantly.
“Sadly, for me, yes, it does. But OK, I guess I was going to say that I don’t think your gift makes you look like a spazz. It’s when you try to cover it up that things seem to go wrong.”
I thought about that and then shook my head. “There isn’t a way around that. I can’t go around telling people that I’ve had a vision of the future. Particularly not Felix Faraday. He was nice, socially competent, and professional. Telling him I’m psychic would make him think I was insane. He’d never help me then.”
I looked sadly at my chicken salad. I’d been so happy only a few minutes before, but now I couldn’t help feeling like my friendship with Felix was doomed to failure.
FELIX
I sat under a tree and smelled the breeze. The rain had finally lightened up, but everything was still wet, so my top layer of fur was soaked, but I was warm enough. It took a lot of rain to get down to the underlayer. However, with the rain stopping, the rabbits were coming out to forage, and I was going to get a snack.
Talking to Maddie had left me energized and restless, so I’d shifted once I got home and gone for a run. Now, I had less energy, but I was still restless.
Maddie was human. And I was a wolf.
Those facts sat like boulders in my way.
I’d spent decades in the corporate world, and I knew for a fact that humans didn’t deal well with magic. They could barely deal with different kinds of humans. Entirely different species pretty much fried their brains.
Being a Shifter was supposed to mean that I had one foot in the human world and one in the animal world. And that was true. But for me, it meant that I was never truly accepted in either. Other wolves, particularly my family, thought business wasn’t a proper wolf endeavor. Everyone seemed to think wolves should be lone bikers or forest rangers or something manly and outdoorsy. The humans who had discovered my abilities generally ran the other way—corporate wolves weren’t supposed to be able to take actual bites out of the competition. I didn’t blame any of them, but it made me lonely. That was why I’d finally retired. I wanted to find a community and maybe a mate. So far, the closest I’d come was Deja Brew.
But Maddie was a human, and I was a wolf.
5
MADDIE
We were in the dead zone of the morning after the nine o’clock rush, and I checked the clock for the hundredth time.
“Oh, God,” groaned Romeo miserably as he chugged his third detox shot of the morning. I kept an entire jug in the fridge for him after family dinner night on the first weekend of the month.
“Romeo,” said Shayla, looking up from her computer, “you have got to stop eating your mom’s spaghetti.”
“I can’t! She would know something was wrong with me!”
I looked around the shop. There was only sweet Mr. Benjamin, who was deaf as a post, and he was staring out the window and enjoying his coffee with hearing aids on the table in front of him.
